The change merchant

Today, after months of mystery and speculation,
Country Road rolls out its brand new logo, store
livery, spring collections and hope for a turnaround
in its fortunes. Fashion editor Janice Breen Burns
spoke to the woman behind the wave of change.

Two blokes in a cherry picker
are hoisting letters off the
facade of Country Road's
Richmond headquarters.
There goes an O, now a T. The
Y's tricky, but - yank, crack
- and that comes off. Inside,
Country Road's group general manager
of product design and development,
Sophie Holt, a 38-year-old, mother of
three who admits being "not so career
focused", is describing her vision for the
future of the label.

"It's one of the most loved brands in
the memories of Australians; we are all
fond of Country Road," she says. "I
want people to come in, and feel
change, but not for our core customers
to be too shocked."

It takes Holt the best part of two
hours to explain which way the
company's pointing, how she's thrashed
out the masterplan with CEO Ian Moir
and marketing director Claire Dobby,
how she has spent months, virtually,
sprawled on the floor amid an
organised chaos of fabric swatches,
pictures, sketches, buttons, zips, scraps
and snips. In homewares, men's wear,
women's wear and children's wear, 20
designers and twice as many others,
worked flatout on a zillion details
involved in Holt's vision and she's
signed off on each and every teeny-tiny
one of them.

When Holt is finished explaining all
this, the cherry-picker and its load of
old letters is gone. The company's
facade is bare except for a dusty
outline of the old logo. Country Road
is officially on the move. Trying to put
the bad headlines and falling profits of
the past few years behind them.

It has been a difficult time for the
former Aussie icon of fashion. For 10
years, the company - which is 87.9
per cent owned by South Africa-based
Woolworths and 11.8 per cent by the
Lew family's Australian Retail
Investments - has battled to change
the idea that its clothing is too
expensive and conservative.

A year ago, Moir offered Holt the
hardest job in Australian fashion. We
can guess the brief now: lure new
customers (don't alienate too many old
ones), maintain high-quality control
(but lower key prices), exploit Country
Road's beloved "Australian-ness"
(steering clear of gumleaf and kangaroo
cliches), make it sexy, edgy and
aspirational (but hang on to the suiting,
careerwear and classics, thanks, and
never mind the widespread public
perceptions of a brand past its use-by
date, plagued by bad luck, accused of
bad management, and subject to near
and real financial disasters).

Easy.

"It was such a bloody good feeling to
find her," Moir says of Holt. "And lucky;
we clicked straight away."

The search for a new merchandise
director had gone on for almost two
years, here and overseas, while a $10
million revamp of what Moir calls the
company's "unsexy, unprofitable"
merchandise systems went ahead. The
answer to the "sexy" part of Country
Road's modernisation, he says, was
under his nose all the time.

"I had admired Sophie's work from
afar. She said, at the time, if I hadn't
called her, she would probably have
called me."

When he did make her the offer
she couldn't refuse, Holt was in her
sixth year as head designer at
Witchery (and, ready for a change). A
veteran of the fashion industry, she
had been promoted in a slippery
upward spiral since she graduated
from Melbourne University with an
arts degree, from salesgirl, to buyer,
to designer, to head designer at
Sportsgirl, to head designer at
Witchery. She was renowned in the
fashion industry for her rock-solid,
bull's-eye fashion sense, her
tendency to perfectionism, and her
habit of being home by six-ish every
night to bathe, feed, play with, and
tuck in her children, now aged 10,
seven and one.

Gossip about Holt also invariably
included her pedigree. She is the
granddaughter of ill-fated 1960s Liberal
Prime Minister Harold Holt and his
colourful widow, better known after her
second marriage as Dame Zara Bate of
the Toorak couture salon, Magg. (Holt's
grandparents are, importantly I think,
mentioned on her CV, issued from
Country Road head office.)

Moir first asked Holt to draw a
picture of the people she envisioned as
Country Road's new customers. Over a
weekend, she tore pages out of dozens
of magazines, of lean, chic, 20 and 30-
something women with clear skin, a
direct gaze, little or no make-up, and a
mixture of high fashion and classic
tastes. They could be mothers,
professionals, artists, sportswomen.
Unfussed, at-ease, "aspirational
people".

"I just put these boards together -
la-la-la - and never realised they were
going to become the cornerstone of
Country Road's new vision. I think I've
presented them 25 times to different
people. We want the same handwriting
right across all the collections."

The pictures of men that Holt tore
out for her storyboards were of a
similar age to the women (mid-20s to
30s) healthy, handsome, distinctly
"blokey". (But more in the manner of
English lads, than Aussie lard-arses.)

"I like this one because he could be
anyone; a plumber, a banker," she says,
pointing out a fresh-looking, 30-
something with a touch of the
metrosexual about him.

"I want to keep this (the label) still
blokey."

According to Holt, there are three
types of customers destined to become
Country Road loyalists from today, the
day the brand's new image and
collections are unveiled. The first, the
"lost" customer.

"I'm one of those - a lost customer
who grew up with the brand," says Holt.
She drifted as the market changed but
Country Road didn't.

"There were a lot more imports, a lot
more competition, more energy and
fashionability. Fashion became more
about individuality."

The second type, the "core"
customer, is still and has always been, a
CR loyalist thanks to her classic taste
and lower expectations than most
fashion consumers. The third, "new"
customer Holt hopes to lure, is younger
and demanding.

"She knows Country Road was
something great once, but not much
else about the brand. I want to get them
and those lost customers back in the
door," Holt says. "I've tried to move it
on, make it more fashionable, add more
surprise, more colour, more pop, so it's
not just a sea of beige.

"I've tried to get it looking less
stitched up, more relaxed, more
feminine."

In a small, skeletal range sifted to
illustrate her points, the clothes are
noticeably well cut, the fabrics fine
(many sourced from Italian mills and
other European mills with which
Country Road has had long
relationships), the details meticulous
and often unexpected.

The basque on a silk-yarn knit, for
example, is twisted at the neckline to
create a slit. A silver-coated Italian linen
knee skirt is cut loose and slouchy, to
hang like a chic afterthought from the
hips.

And, career options ("I still want us
to be known as a destination for
careerwear") are softened with a blend
of urban-wear separates. A neat skirt for
instance, goes with an ombre-dyed
thin-knit cardigan. A tailored jacket is
slipped over a swishy, draped jersey
skirt.

It's not rocket science, but the result
is clever and chic, in a Calvin Klein-ish
(under new designer Francisco Costa)
or even a Scanlan & Theodore-ish way.

For Holt, the ideal outcome of this
year of focused passion will be the
revival of an icon, and the return of its
status as a label "that reflects Australian
modern living in every way".

"I'm aware we can't be all things to
all people," she says, and then, asked if
she could envision a Country Road man
and woman arriving home at night to
their Country Road children in their
Country Road-decorated house, and
holidaying at weekends at their Country
Road beach retreat, she adds,
"Absolutely."